Tarot cards lost all mystical power in my eyes when I found out that old Italian men use tarot decks to gamble. Someone’s Nonno is out here playing The Tower in attack mode to take his buddy Sergio to the cleaners, and I think that’s beautiful.
since tarot card games are a particular area of interest for me I'll use this post aa an opportunity to infodump
not just Italians! and there's a plethora of traditional card games that use tarot cards across Europe (and some even made it to America)!!!
italians have a couple of gambling tarot games similar to blackjack, but the more well known games both in italy as well as france and much of former austria-hungary are actually closer spades or bridge
the major arcana function as a trump suit in tarot games, and the fool is either an excuse card (play it at any time to not have to follow suit or play a trump - you get the card back (it's valuable!) but you don't win the trick and in fact have to give a worthless card to the winner of the trick) or as the absolute highest trump card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_card_games?wprov=sfla1
https://www.pagat.com/tarot/




















